January 2011

On January 28, 1986, my parents and I boarded Northwest Airlines flight 981 from Minneapolis to Orlando, Florida, where we would begin our Disney World vacation. Toward the end of the trip, as the plane neared Cape Canaveral, the pilot’s voice came over the loudspeaker: “Those of you on the left side of the plane will see the Challenger space shuttle carrying Christa McAuliffe, the first civilian in space.”

I was 12 years old, and my grade school class had been following McAuliffe in the news. She was a hero to us, and of course, we weren’t alone; from what I could tell, all the children aboard the flight had been seated on the left so that they could witness the spectacle. “If you watch closely,” the pilot continued, “you will see the first phase of the launch. In four minutes, the shuttle will drop its primary boosters.”

Any military officer who doesn’t seem to grasp the fact that it is better to be caught with one’s air cover actually up in the air rather than lined up on the ground needs to go back to the Academy.

Everything I have read and studied about General Short and Admiral Kimmel leads me to believe that they were not bad men, nor would any additional intelligence have helped them ("Pearl Harbor: What Really Happened?,” July/August). They did not even act on the information they had. They were all too typical of the pre-war officer: unimaginative, noninnovative, and, unfortunately, not very competent. Each officer assumed that things were being done by the other, which, as the saying goes, makes an ass of you and me. The strike could not have been prevented, but the losses might have been much mitigated had the commanders been up to the job.

The article on Vietnam in the May issue is the best, most balanced analysis I have ever read on this war that has so greatly affected my generation. The historian Victor Davis Hanson can be very proud of this honest piece. Coming on the heels of the news about the former senator Bob Kerrey, it should be required reading in every journalism school in the country. I look forward to each issue of American Heritage , and will be keeping them.

Growing up in the Great Lakes region of North America, I developed an early appreciation for the European explorers who had long ago traveled the waterways of my home. I read all the books I could find about adventurers like Champlain, Jolliet, Marquette, and Nicolet, and they defined what I thought I should be as a young man: tough, brave, single-minded, and born a couple of hundred years earlier. When I got older, though, I realized that my affection for these men was not shared by everyone. I started college in 1992, seemingly at the height of the so-called revisionist historians’ attempts to convert the old pioneering heroes into the new societal enemies.

mail@americanheritage.com TET AND PEARL TET AND PEARL TET AND PEARL

Whatever the calendars say, in some figurative sense, America’s 1950s ended, and the 1960s began, on January 17, 1961, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered the most memorable farewell address by a Chief Executive since another old soldier, George Washington, warned his new nation back in 1796 to stick together always in the cause of its founding principles. Ike, of course, had led the Allied forces in Europe to the triumph of democracy in World War II, a century and a half after General Washington had won America’s freedom in the Revolutionary War. What remains striking about the very similar public good-byes the two generals made upon leaving the Presidency 165 years apart is the depth of thought in their enduring appeals to humanity’s better nature.

Listen to the Farewell Address

“It’s better to be looked over than overlooked.”

“Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?”

“I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.”

“It’s not the men in your life—it’s the life in your men.”

“So many men, so little time.”

“Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly.”

“Give a man a free hand and he’ll run it all over you.”

“I’ve been in more laps than a napkin.”

“She’s the kind of girl who climbed the ladder of success wrong by wrong.”

“I generally avoid temptation unless I can’t resist it.”

“Too much of a good thing is wonderful.”

“When choosing between two evils, I always like to take the one I’ve never tried before.”

“I’m no angel, but I’ve spread my wings a bit.”

When I was in college in the late 1960s, my disaffected classmates and I spent a good deal of time decrying the “military-industrial complex.”

I thought that Jerry Rubin probably had coined the phrase, but it might have been Abbie Hoffman. I certainly never dreamed that it came from that amiable, dopey (yet at the same time, because of his military background, slightly sinister) old fud Dwight D. Eisenhower.

It did, though, as Douglas Brinkley explains in this issue, and thus, Ike added to our historical vocabulary a phrase that will last as long as people remember the era that gave it birth. Has any other 20th-century president encapsulated so broad-reaching a concern so succinctly? It’s one more example of the coruscating intelligence that Eisenhower chose never to flaunt, but which allowed him to prevail in a job that combined the political complexities of Lincoln’s with military challenges nearly as daunting as those Washington faced.